Saturday, January 30, 2016

Staunton, January 30 – Having been
identified by a British court as involved with the murder by plutonium of
Aleksandr Litvinenko, Vladimir Putin likely faces something even more
devastating: In taking up the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, the International
Criminal Court in the Hague seems certain to find Moscow guilty of ethnic
cleansing, according to Vitaly Portnikov.

That conclusion will reveal “a
completely new face of the Kremlin regime, the Ukrainian commentator says,
because it is “one thing to seize other’s territories … and quite another to
carry out a banal ethnic cleansing according to the recipes of Adolf Hitler or
Slobodan Milosevic (grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.248138.html).

The
Russian-Georgian war of 2008, Portnikov points out, involved ethnic cleansing. “Georgian
villages in South Osetia were burned to the group and many of their residents
destroyed. The ‘territorial integrity’ of the Republic South Osetia which was
soon recognized by Moscow and Caracas was secured namely by such an inhuman
price.”

In
fact, “there is nothing new in this,” he continues. “The war in Abkhazia in the
early 1990s was a banal act of ethnic cleansing: out of the republic then were
driven a large part of its residents, in the first instance, those of Georgian
origin.”But there as more recently in
the Donbas, Moscow had a kind of cover as this was done by nominally local
militias.

“But
in South Osetia, there is no way to conceal what was done,” Portnikov says.
There, regular units of the Russian army, whose supreme commander was at the
time the harmless executor Dima Medvedev carried out ethnic cleansing.” And it
seems clear that the International Criminal Court will so conclude.

That
this will change how people view the 2008 war is suggested by what happened to
Milosevich when he shifted from using local militias to carry out ethnic
cleansing to employing regular army units.The international community was willing to put up with the former, but
it wasn’t with the latter.

For
most of the last eight years, those talking about the Russian-Georgian war have
been obsessed about who started it. But what is interesting now is that “even
if Georgia began it first,” that in no way can “justify the expulsion of
Georgian peasants from their native places, the burning of their homes and
murder.”

When
the International Court releases its findings, the world will have “a
completely new picture of the Russian soldier” who is prepared to destroy someone
simply because he is an ethnic Georgian and not an ethnic Osetian.And “we will receive a completely new picture
of a Russian general, a new Eichman, who led this ethnic cleansing.”

Finally,
Portnikov says, the world will gain “a completely new picture of the Russian
president who sent his forces to commit genocide.” And even if that turns out
to be “not Putin but Medvedev, this fact “will not have particular importance.
In the dock of the Hague court, all these people should sit next to each other.”

Not
surprisingly, Russian officialdom has reacted with alarm and anger, announcing
that Moscow plans “a review of its relations” with the court given that it had
expected greater consideration (ria.ru/world/20160129/1367042307.html).
Translated from diplomatic language, that means the Russian authorities aren’t
going to cooperate in this investigation.

But that too may not matter: if the
court finds that officials engaged in the crime of ethnic cleansing, it can
issue an order for their arrest and call on governments of the world to arrest
at first opportunity those so charged and to dispatch them to the Hague for
judgment.